René Émile Char (French: [ʁəne ʃaʁ]; born June 14, 1907; died February 19, 1988) was a French poet who was part of the French Resistance during World War II.

Biography

René Char was born in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, a town in the Vaucluse region of France. He was the youngest of four children in a family led by Emile Char and Marie-Thérèse Rouget. His father was mayor and manager of a plasterworks factory in the area. Char grew up in Névons, a large family home that was completed when he was born. He later attended school in Avignon as a boarder and, in 1925, studied at L'École de Commerce de Marseille. During his studies, he read works by writers such as Plutarch, François Villon, Racine, the German Romantics, Alfred de Vigny, Gérard de Nerval, and Charles Baudelaire. Char was tall (1.92 meters) and played rugby actively. He briefly worked in Cavaillon before completing his military service in the artillery in Nîmes in 1927.

His first book, Cloches sur le cœur (1928), was a collection of poems written between 1922 and 1926. In early 1929, he co-founded the journal Méridiens with André Cayatte and published three issues. In August 1929, he sent 26 copies of his book Arsenal, published in Nîmes, to the poet Paul Éluard. Later that year, Éluard visited Char in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. In late November 1929, Char moved to Paris, where he met writers Louis Aragon, André Breton, and René Crevel. He joined the surrealist movement and published his essay "Profession de foi du sujet" in December 1929 in the twelfth issue of La Révolution surréaliste. Char remained involved with surrealism until the early 1930s but gradually became less connected afterward. His work was often published with artwork by famous artists, including Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, Miró, Matisse, and Vieira da Silva.

In 1940, Char joined the French Resistance, using the name Captain Alexandre. He led operations at the Durance parachute drop zone. During the German occupation of France, he refused to publish any works but wrote Feuillets d'Hypnos (1943–1944), prose poems about resistance. These were published in 1946 and received widespread praise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Char matured as a poet despite brief and unsuccessful attempts in theater and film. In the 1960s, he opposed the placement of atomic weapons in Provence. Char died of a heart attack in 1988 in Paris. The Hotel Campredon (also called the Maison René Char) in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue housed his manuscripts, drawings, paintings, and art objects until 2016.

Char was friends with writers Albert Camus, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot, as well as artists Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Victor Brauner. He was scheduled to be in the car that crashed and killed Camus and Michel Gallimard but could not fit, so he returned to Paris by train that day. The composer Pierre Boulez set three of Char's poems to music: Le Soleil des eaux, Le Visage nuptial, and Le Marteau sans maître. Char also had a late friendship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who praised Char's poetry as "a tour de force into the ineffable" and often hosted him at Le Thor in the Vaucluse region.

Notable works

• Ralentir Travaux (1930 – worked with André Breton and Paul Éluard)
• Le Marteau sans maître (1934)
• Moulin premier (1936)
• Placard pour un chemin des écoliers (1937)
• Dehors la nuit est gouvernée (1938)
• Seuls demeurent (1945)
• Feuillets d'Hypnos (1946)
• Le Poème pulvérisé (1947)
• Fureur et mystère (1948)
• Les Matinaux (1950)
• Recherche de la base et du sommet (1955)
• La Parole en archipel (1962)
• L'Âge cassant (1965)
• Dans la Pluie giboyeuse (1968)
• Le Nu perdu (1971)
• La Nuit talismanique (1972)
• Le Bâton de rosier
• Aromates chasseurs (1976)
• Chants de la Balandrane (1977)
• Fenêtres dormantes et porte sur le toit (1979)
• Loin de nos cendres (1983)
• Les voisinages de Van Gogh (1985)
• Éloge d'une soupçonnée (1988)

Char's Complete Works were published in the important Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Gallimard) in 1983 with an introduction by Jean Roudaut. An expanded version was published again in 1995 after Char's death.

Translations

Some of the poets who translated his difficult-to-understand works into English are William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wilbur, James Wright, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, Cid Corman, Gustaf Sobin, Kevin Hart (poet), and Paul Auster. Translators into German include Paul Celan and Peter Handke. Translators into Bulgarian include Georgi Mitzkov and Zlatozar Petrov.